Wednesday, 29 March 2017

So I’ve nearly gone two
months again without posting – I’m sorry for that. Between assignment deadlines
and a stint of work the last month has been pretty stressful and it’s not
letting me off yet either. My next deadline is tomorrow but luckily when you’re
reading this I have already submitted my piece. I did spend a good deal of last
week pissing about *not* working on it because I’m scared of my story. Which was
really stupid of me because my last assignment deadline was an insane scramble
at the last minute so I shouldn’t want to do the same thing twice in one month.

My last deadline turned
into three-day period of frantic drafting and eye-bleedingly brutal editing so
I could get my short story submitted only five minutes before the end of the
“12hr grace period” which I have exploited far too frequently in my OU career.
It wasn’t meant to go like that. I had a plan to get a first draft of the story
done in mid-Feb, so I could tell myself the story without caring about the word
count. Then over the next 2-3 weeks before my deadline I could work on revising
the story until it was within the 2,500-2750 word limit that this assignment
called for, and get it submitted early – all chill and relaxed y’know?

But that plan got shot
to shit when my mother asked me if I could do some cover work for her company –
for two weeks out of the three before my deadline. At that point I was
dangerously close to having absolutely no money in any of my accounts so I
couldn’t not say yes and that’s
without my unwillingness to disappoint my mother. I thought that I could manage
working full-time for two weeks and still get my writing done – I mean I wrote
around 50K in the first part of 2014 while I was working full-time as a TA
*and* doing two different study courses at the same time so surely I could
manage a couple of thousand words over two weeks??

Turns out I couldn’t.
Despite barely being busy for about half of the time I was working as Reception
Cover I only got about 900 words written over those two weeks. I emailed myself
the word document back and forth so I could work on it during quiet times at
the office – I had periods of several hours where the phone wouldn’t ring and I
had nothing else to do but I just couldn’t get myself into a good writing flow
to churn out a draft of the story. Then when I got home my brain checked out
and I wasted the rest of my day catching up on all the internet stuff that I
couldn’t access at work.

So I ended up have only
three days to somehow clobber out the rest of this short story then rein it
back to within the TMA word limit as well as writing a commentary about my
creative process that sounded like I had actually bothered to use the module’s
textbook as anything more than an oversized paperweight. By the night before my
deadline I had a complete draft of the story that I really liked – it was
unfortunately 4,000 words too long.

Now obviously I was tad
worried that I wouldn’t be able to get the draft edited down to the right size
in time without completely rewriting it, yet I didn’t email my tutor to ask for
an extension. Why? Because I hated feeling like I’d failed and that I needed to
ask for more time. I should have been able to get the assignment done well ahead
of my deadline so I was basically punishing myself for not meeting the goal that
I’d arbitrarily set.

As I mentioned above I
did manage to get my story edited and submitted in time but there has been a
particularly frustrating development to this tale which I never expected when I
started writing this post. I should have got my mark back in 10 working days,
so by the 23rd at the latest, yet I’d still got nothing on Monday.
Until I got an email from my tutor at 11 o’clock at *night* as I was about to
go to bed, that sparked such rage I didn’t get to sleep for another 2 & a
half hours.

It turns out that my
tutor managed to misplace my story on her own computer drive and thought she
didn’t have it for over two weeks! It only occurred to her on MONDAY THE 27th
to email me to ask where it was despite not having any contact from me telling
her my submission would be late (cos you know that would be standard academic
practice to INFORM SOMEONE ABOUT A DELAY). Needless to say my email back to her
strongly expressed my distinct displeasure with remarkably no expletives.

The most hilariously
ironic part of all of this is that when I got my mark back yesterday afternoon,
it has somehow transpired that this short story - which was the most difficult
to complete out of all the assignments I’ve done this year – has ended up with
the best mark. It is the *only* TMA that I’ve got a First on from either of my
Level 3 modules. What the fuck do I even *do* with that? I mean seriously?

I’ve spent the last two
weeks worried as hell that my tutor was going to hate my story and that,
despite the glowing endorsements from my wonderful friends who read it while I
was frantically hacking it shorter, that it was actually shit. I’m honestly not
sure if this mark is validation I actually deserve.

Is it strange that I
still feel like I’m a disappointment by having fluked a great mark *yet again*
when the majority of my effort only came at the last possible moment and even
then I feel like it wasn’t the most I could’ve put into it?

At least I only have one
deadline left then if all things go like I hope, this degree I’ve been dragging
myself towards for the last 8 years will finally be done. Thank gawd.